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Catalyst Game Labs At Origins Game Fair 2011: Wrap-up Report

Catalyst Game Labs had its biggest presence yet at the Origins Game Fair, including a larger booth than last year, as well as the most new releases at an Origins to date: Runner’s Toolkit, Shadowrun Gamemaster Screen Limited Edition, Spy Games, Era Report: 3062, A Time of War Gamemaster Screen (Standard & Limited Edition versions), and HexPack: Lakes and Rivers (including the DropShip Promotional Tile). We also had new, unique BattleTech and Shadowrun dice, as well as sharing the booth with Dan Tibbles and his brilliant, new IronDie.

We had some cool new additions to the booth this year as well. With Leviathans lifting off into skies of action this year, we included a diorama (by Robert DeHoff) and a 2-foot long model of the French Grenouille-class Destroyer (by Behrle Hubbuch).

As usual, we ran a large and aggressive schedule of events covering Shadowrun, BattleTech, and Leviathans.

SHADOWRUN

We ran 46 events for 272 players, for a total of 188 hours of pure Shadowrun awesome-sauce-ness, and 250 man-hours of convention goodness.

We couldn’t possibly run such an amazing number of events with out our killer crew of shadowrunners: Bull, Galen Winkler, Geoff Raye, Nick Van, Ray Rigel, Robert Loper, Shaun Burton, Andrew Coen, Robin Sheldrake, Michael Barnes, John Schmidt, Robert Thomas, and Joseph King.

BATTLETECH & LEVIATHANS

We ran 399 people (some of these were repeat players) through 115 events: 160 hours of BattleTech and 50 hours of Leviathans, for a total of 414 man hours of convention insanity.

As with Shadowrun, our demo agents are just amazing and we can’t thank them enough for all their hard work in ensuring that our gaming communities have the best gaming experience possible at a convention: Michael Miller, Alex Kaempen, Mary Kaempen, Amanda Mitro, David Leaver, James Miller, Andrew Schwenzer, Brian Huss, Craig Tome, Dan Sweikata, James O’Laughlin, Jeremy Weyand, Keith McDiffitt, Robert DeHoff, Travis Friedmann, William Pennington, Jim Topa, Eric Ergen, and John Peters.

A special shout-out to Michael Miller and Bull, both intrepid convention coordinators for all our games, not just at conventions, but also all in-store events as well. Thanks for the brilliant work often under crazy circumstances!

BATTLETECH FIRESTORM PODS

As usual, our friends from www.mechjock.com were there providing their unique brand of BattleTech experience…thanks to Nick Smith and his cohorts for running at all insane hours of the night!

ORIGINS AWARDS

We’re very pleased that the Shadowrun fiction anthology Spells & Chrome won an Origins Award! Thanks so much to all those who voted, and congratulations to all the other winners!!!

WRAPPING UP

This years Origins was our best yet and we had a wonderful time. Thanks to all those that played a game or just stopped by the booth to chat. Your experience is ours and we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.

While it’s always brilliant to see a swath of dozens of people playing our games and catching up with convention goers we’ve been meeting for years, we just have to share one of our favorite photos of the entire convention: after this demo he played many, many more hours of Leviathans in the miniatures hall…seeing this always brings a huge smile to our faces as it shows our beloved hobby can have a bright future.